Revenge Question Torments Bosnian Community

The women came first. Two by two, each of the 60 or so women and girls gravely shook the hand of Hartford police Capt. Mark Pawlina as they entered the meeting hall.

Next came the men, many wearing dark leather jackets and bearing a whiff of tobacco smoke. Now silent after a protest march down Franklin Avenue, most of the men also shook the police captain's hand, as if Pawlina were a minister standing at the door of a church.

One month after Nihad Siljkovic was gunned down in Hartford's South End, his fellow refugees from Bosnia made a kind of congregation, 150 people strong, as they entered a community center in the same neighborhood this week.

The emotion that surged through this group was not reverence, however. It was anger.

Almost to a person, the Bosnians who mourn Nihad remain convinced that his Dec. 29 killing was not a random act. The survivors of an unspeakably brutal tribal war in their native country believe the 17-year-old was shot in an act of revenge.

In their demand that the authorities give them justice for the killing, a group of refugees who have filtered into Hartford by the thousands over the past five years are, for the first time, raising their collective voice.

If the Bosnians are suspicious of their new country's justice system, the local institutions working with them most directly -- the schools and the police -- also are struggling to understand the city's newest ethnic community.

The Hartford school system's grief counselors discovered they weren't wanted when they tried to help Bosnian students at Bulkeley High School, where Nihad was a student, after the killing.

``There was shock and disbelief,'' said Winston Johnson, the district's coordinator for social work services.

But that's about all he knows. Johnson and other counselors were asked to leave the Bosnian students' classroom because their presence was making the students nervous and shy.

At Tuesday's community meeting, as the Bosnians pressed Hartford police for information about the killing, it was clear that virtually all believed in a connection with a Nov. 22 hit-and-run accident in which Nihad was the driver.

The pedestrian who was struck, a Hispanic woman from the South End, was seriously injured and continues to undergo physical therapy, police said. Nihad was interviewed by police the night of the accident and said he knew he hit something but continued driving because he was afraid.

Police obtained a warrant charging Nihad with evading responsibility, but it had not been served before he was killed.

Bosnians are demanding that the police find out whether Nihad was slain in retribution.

Nihad was sitting in a car on Franklin Avenue when another young man walked up to him and shot him through the passenger's side window, according to witness statements to the police.

Witnesses, including two of Nihad's friends who had just gotten into the car, said the man walked up to the car and stared through the windows for several seconds.

The man replied, ``What am I looking at? This is what I'm looking at.'' He pulled out a handgun, shot Nihad and walked away, the witnesses said.

Police say there is no evidence the killing was an act of revenge for the hit-and-run a month earlier, although they say they have carefully examined that possibility. Many Bosnians, however, are not satisfied with those explanations.

``The only way you're going to get this person is if you sit down with the girl and talk to her family,'' a young Bosnian man in a black turtleneck told Pawlina at the community meeting. ``If this was not planned, why only him? There were three people in the car. Everybody knows who did this.''

Before the man stalked out of the meeting, refusing to give his name to a reporter, the emotional charge in the room was palpable. Larry Woods, the North End community organizer who put the march together, suddenly looked like a man with a wolf by the ears as he tried to soothe the crowd by defending Pawlina and the Hartford police.

``I believe the captain is using every resource possible. I have faith in the man,'' Woods called to the crowd. ``Do you?''

``Yes, we do,'' some in the crowd murmured back.

Then, a thin man in a leather jacket spoke out angrily in Serbo-Croatian from the back of the room. He was not satisfied at all with Pawlina's words, he said through a translator. He was Nihad Siljkovic's father, Fikret Siljkovic.

``This same information you're telling us, we knew the first day,'' Siljkovic said angrily. He said he wanted to speak personally with the detectives investigating the case.

``We would like to meet the family'' of the woman injured in the accident, a Bosnian woman told Pawlina. ``If they could talk to us, we could see what is going on.''

Pawlina said he could not allow the Bosnians to speak with the family of the accident victim. The police had already done that, he told them at the community meeting.